扎克伯格知识经济时代到来

    现在是马克•扎克伯格的知识经济时代了。我们都乐在其中分享信息。

    或者至少从目前来看，离马克•扎克伯格的梦想越来越近。三个月前，Facebook的季度财报让华尔街分析师无地自容，扎克伯格那时就在电话会议中大力宣传“知识经济”这个概念。这个月，Facebook再次超出华尔街预期，扎克伯格和其他高管在电话会议中反复提到“知识经济”，次数足有八遍。上世纪90年代，许多作家和咨询师喜欢使用空洞乏味而又毫无意义的词语描述一些模糊的概念，“知识经济”就是其中之一。信息时代即将来临，创造力将成为最宝贵的财富。至于还有哪些实质性内容，天知道。

    过去10年，专业学者们开始正视“知识经济”这个现象。2004年，斯坦福大学（Stanford）教授沃尔特•鲍威尔指出：知识经济即“能够促进生产力发展、科技进步和技术革新的知识密集型活动”。不过，知识作为一种资本仍然虚无缥缈，而且难以度量，至于创新所能带来的经济效应更多时候只是大家在生搬硬套。

    为了更好的阐述Facebook的长远战略，扎克伯格重新定义了“知识经济”。今年4月，他在《华盛顿邮报》（Washington Post）的专栏中写到，“今天的世界经济……是建立在知识和创新之上的——每个人都拥有这些资源，每个人都能将它发扬光大。”

    扎克伯格在专栏中宣布成立FWD.us（前进！美国人），这是一家政治游说组织，旨在推进美国移民政策改革和教育科研改革。这个组织以美国人民为中心，它的政治宣言都是“知识经济具备可持续发展性，能为美国人民创造更多就业机会，提供更高质量的生活”这一类。

    6月份的营收会议上，扎克伯格将“知识经济”的范畴扩大到积极融合全球劳动力市场。现在，这个概念又加入了能支持“全球以知识和信息为主体的更大规模的经济转型”。知识经济如今意味着能创造更多与信息有关的工作。

    在最近这个季度，尤其是Facebook发布了表现惊人的财报后，扎克伯格再次扩充了自己的理念。他说：“帮助人们创造就业机会，支持以信息和创新为主体的更大规模的全球经济转型。”现在的“知识经济”是理想主义和现实主义的结合。

    如果换个角度来看，“知识经济”从本质上可以理解为卖出更多更好的广告。

    “构建知识经济的关键在于开发与信息相关的工具，所有人都可以从中受益……从企业角度出发，我们将构建更好的服务，用更高质量的广告吸引用户，用更精准的定位提高营销效率，使用更好的分析工具，提供更全面的分析数据。用户将切身体会到这点，广告与他们日常生活的关联性将越来越强。”

    不管Facebook的新口号意义如何，它至少向我们展示了这家公司的长远商业目标，而且更为重要的是，我们看到了Facebook的雄心壮志。汇集50亿在线用户，换句话说，扎克伯格希望大家都能为Facebook的营收添砖加瓦。

    所有这一切和Facebook的初创理念并无本质的差别，不过，Facebook的目标正在不断扩充中。首先，扎克伯格将Facebook打造为全球性社交网站，拥有12亿会员，每天活跃人数高达7.27亿。随后，Facebook从活跃会员身上发现了商机，在滚动信息中加入了广告。它对用户的干扰很小，而且它们的参与度也得到了提高。

    It's Mark Zuckerberg's knowledge economy now. And the rest of us just share information inside it.

    Or at least, that is how it appears to Mark Zuckerberg. Ever since Facebook (FB) blew away its earnings three months ago, the company's CEO has been peppering conference calls with the term. This month, when Facebook again blew past the Street's estimates, he and other executives used the phrase eight times.

    The term "knowledge economy" has been around for a couple of decades. In the 1990s, it was one of those infuriatingly vague buzzwords favored by writers and consultants who gave it such a broad definition it ultimately had little meaning. The age of information was dawning, its primary raw material was creative brainpower. But there was little to say beyond that.

    In the past decade, academics began taking a harder look at the term. In 2004, Stanford's Walter Powell defined it as "knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence." But knowledge as capital remained as intangible and hard to measure as ever, and the evidence of its innovations were largely anecdotal.

    In appropriating the term to describe Facebook's long-term strategy, Zuckerberg has refined the definition. In a Washington Post op-ed last April, Zuckerberg wrote that "Today's economy... is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone."

    With the op-ed, Zuckerberg was announcing FWD.us, a lobbying group advocating for immigration reform and other issues like science research and education. The vision was US-centric, with statements like "A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation."

    In a July earnings call, Zuckerberg shifted the scope of his knowledge economy to embrace a global workforce. Now, the knowledge economy involved a "platform to support a larger economic shift in the world based on knowledge and information." The knowledge economy was about creating information-oriented jobs.

    In the most recent quarter, after an even more impressive earnings report, Zuckerbeg expanded further on his pet concept. The knowledge economy, he said, "is about helping people create growth in jobs and supporting a larger economic shift in the world based on information and ideas." Now, the term had taken on both idealistic and commercially pragmatic aspects.

    Viewed another way, however, the knowledge economy can be boiled down to selling more and better ads.

    "The key to building the knowledge economy is building tools for everyone to use information to do their jobs better... The way businesses will experience this effort is that we will keep building better services for them to reach their customers with higher quality ads, more efficient leads with better targeting, better analytics and using richer formats. The way people will experience this effort is that the ads they see will become more and more relevant to their lives."

    Whether high-minded or not, this new rallying cry matters to Facebook because it not only shows that the company is in business for the long haul, it also shows how. Facebook is scaling up its ambitions. Getting five billion people online is a noble way of saying Zuckerberg wants to them, and detailed information about them, on Facebook.